Dear Monica Lewinsky
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 14, 2026
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid (“Sublime”—NYTBR) comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites.
A LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR
“A wild, wonderful essential novel.” —Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
“Truly funny.”—Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here
Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels.
In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint, a figure of both suffering and sympathy. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears—powerful, radiant, wise, and witty—and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998. Had Jean merely been naive and stupid, as she has told herself for so long? Was it sheer weakness that led her into the affair? Or will Jean, with Saint Monica by her side, see past blame to the beauty of her younger self’s search for pleasure, connection, and transcendence?
Told in flashbacks of those sunlit six weeks in France, replete with Saint Monica’s flinty, fiery insights and interspersed with retellings of the lives of real historical martyrs, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and wholly original examination of desire and its costs, of appetite and its denial, and of certain defeat and surprise renewal. It asks what grace and forgiveness might look like both in our own individual lives and as a society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Langbein's incandescent sophomore novel (after American Mermaid) whose life is still in shambles following a toxic relationship with her college professor almost two decades earlier, it feels like "#MeToo had come and gone like a parade two streets over." The novel takes shape as Jean begins praying to Monica Lewinsky, "patron saint of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty," whose affair with Bill Clinton came to light in 1998, just as Jean was in the throes of her own infatuation. Amazingly, the glowing figure of Saint Monica appears to answer, leading Jean to reflect on the summer of her sophomore year at Rutgers, when she studied medieval art in rural France. Singled out by David, the professor leading the trip, Jean becomes as obsessed with his charm as he is smitten by her raw authenticity. But after their brief fling, she has a hard time not seeing herself through his eyes. Langbein packs the fierce and funny tale with weighty insights into female desire, ambition, and selfhood, making it a winning combination of comedy, critique, and fantasy. She also fully delivers on the audacious conceit, which begins with a head-turning prologue on Monica's affair with "emperor" Bill Clinton: "Well, the emperor had many enemies, foremost among them a dogged Christian prosecutor named Kenneth.... imagined that the emperor had all the sex that Kenneth denied himself, and so he decried the emperor loudly as a man with no virtue, unfit to be ruler of the Americans." This is a revelation.
